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Chapter 2. Fibre Channel Architecture

Before jumping headfirst into using storage area networks, you need
to understand something about the technology upon which most of them
are based: Fibre Channel. You need to know answers to questions such
as:

Just what is Fibre Channel, anyway?

What are the different variations (topologies) of Fibre Channel?

What are the different parts of a Fibre Channel SAN?

Although this chapter is limited in size, it should explain Fibre
Channel enough that you can understand the rest of the SAN chapters
in this book. If you need to learn more about the inner workings of
Fibre Channel, there are plenty of good books to help you.

Fibre Channel: An Overview

SANs certainly qualify as leading-edge technology. Some things being
done with SANs can even be considered “bleeding
edge.” It’s no surprise, then, that
many people don’t fully understand them yet.
However, Fibre Channel has been around for years, and it is also a
mystery. Why is that? Perhaps the reason Fibre Channel is so unknown
is that you really didn’t need to know too much
about it up to this point. For most people, Fibre Channel meant
plugging in a Fibre Channel disk to a host, and that was the end of
it. They didn’t know that they were creating a
point-to-point Fibre Channel network when they did that. Even more
people didn’t realize that they were creating an
arbitrated loop when they daisy-chained a few storage arrays together
on the back of a server.

You don’t need to know a whole lot about Fibre ...

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